Sand Canyon Trail | Castle Rock Pueblo

A lone standing wall is all that remains of Castle Rock Pueblo.

From the Sand Canyon South Trailhead parking lot, where my little Kia was parked in this image, the trail leads you up a sloping stretch of slickrock and around a sandstone butte known as Battle Rock. That's Battle Rock in the upper right corner of the image of my car in the parking lot and it can also be seen in this image along with the BLM sign for Canyon of the Ancients. As the trail rounds Battle Rock, a spur leads you to the day's first ruins.

All that remains of this once sprawling village known as Castle Rock Pueblo is this lone standing wall. The surrounding ground is littered with cut stones that once made 40 above ground rooms, 9 towers, a D-shaped building and at least 16 kivas. At its height, between 1250 and 1280 AD, the pueblo even included rooms and structures built on the sides and top of the butte. The Crow Canyon Archeological Center in Cortez has an interesting article on the oral history of Castle Rock Pueblo, along with a series of photographs from an 1874 survey of the pueblo showing the remains of structures on the butte. See Figure 1 and Figure 2 to see the additional ruins. Figure 3 and Figure 4 are also interesting but don't show additional ruins.

Also, the first 3 images in the Traces of the Ancient World: Details gallery are close up views of the Ancestral Pueblo stonework from this last remaining part of Castle Rock Pueblo.

Off Roading: Kia Style

My Kia Spectra at the Sand Canyon South trail head.

Following breakfast and a quick photo walk around the property on my first morning at Kelly Place, I hopped into my car and made my way over to the Sand Canyon South trail head for a morning of hiking.

The trail head is less than a mile up the road from Kelly Place and so close that I drove right past it as I wasn't expecting it so soon. In fact, I was looking at some interesting butte formations on the opposite side of the road, wondering if there we ruins over there as well. It appeared to be private land on that side of the road, but in all honesty, it would be somewhat hard to believe that there wasn't something ancient over there. The whole Four Corners area is so loaded with Ancestral Puebloan ruins (as well as those from other cultures) that I've heard "you can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting something." Often times it may be a small relatively uninteresting structure, but they are everywhere!

After a slight detour up the road and back, I arrived at the Sand Canyon trail head and while this photo insinuates a rough ride in, this parking area is right off the main road. At most, my little Kia only had to survive about 20 feet of driving on solid bedrock to arrive at this location.

The Sand Canyon Trail is part of Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, one of the country's newest National Parks, which was designated to preserve and protect the highest concentration of archaeological sites in the United States. Over 6,000 distinct structures have been identified within the 164,000 acres of the monument and Sand Canyon contains a number of well preserved cliff dwellings. Spurs in the trail take you right to the base of a handful of these dwellings and many others can be seen in alcoves on the other, inaccessible, side of the canyon.

Images of the dwellings to come shortly...

Sue's Ruin in the Morning Light

Sue's Ruin in the morning light.

Here's another view of the reconstructed pueblo, known as Sue's Ruin, on the Kelly Place property. Sue's Ruin is just one of the many remnants of the Ancestral Puebloans that can be found on a quick walk around the main lodge.

The pueblo, named after the property's original owner's wife, was in use between about 980 and 1225 AD and spans two distinct construction styles, Pueblo II and Pueblo III. The Kellys first excavated this 13 room pueblo and its kiva in the 1960s but back filled it once they were done to prevent further deterioration of the fragile walls. The pueblo and kiva were again excavated in 1988 and stabilized with the help of trained archaeologists.

While this image makes the pueblo look rather small, it's a trick of perspective. From this angle, the back side of the pueblo, only the very top of the reconstructed walls stick out above the tall grasses along the ridge of a hill. The pueblo, and its kiva, is actually large enough to house several families.

Sue's Ruin provided an excellent subject for me while I stayed at Kelly Place. It's accessible (only a couple hundred feet from the main lodge), photogenic and just plain interesting. I've got a number of interesting images to share just of this small part of my trip, and many of the others show the pueblo's true size much better, but next up is Sand Canyon Trail. If I don't keep these posts at least somewhat in chronological order, it's going to quickly turn into a mess of confusion for me.

Granary & Kelly Place

Ancestral Puebloan Granary on the Kelly Place property.

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Disclaimer: In the interest of honesty and openness, I have to say that the good folks at Kelly Place offered me a 2 night stay in exchange for using some of the information found on my Dad's website. That being said, if I hadn't enjoyed the stay, I would only mention "I stayed here" and that's it. But Marc and Jerene really have a great place set up there just outside of Cortez, especially for visitors interested in the Ancestral Puebloan culture that dominated the Four Corners region hundreds of years ago. 

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OK now that that's out of the way, I recently had a chance to make a return visit to Cortez, Co. This visit was roughly my second and half visit to the Cortez area and it was a wonderful trip. My first visit came around the time when I was six as I accompanied my dad on his move from Syracuse, NY to Los Angeles, Calif. Being the smart guy that he is, Dad knew he couldn't keep a growing 6 year old cooped up in the car for a full 5 days of hard driving so he planned numerous stops for us. One of those stops was Mesa Verde National Park. It was that stop that really entranced both of us in the culture from hundreds of years ago that left reminders of their presence scattered across the landscape. This visit ultimately led dozens upon dozens of follow up visits to the Four Corners area, 3 books (2 as co-authors), my dad's website (anasaziadventure.com) and Dad eventually moving to the area to lead tours around many of the National Parks and Monuments in the area. In other words, it was a rather significant point in both our lives.

Despite numerous trips with Dad back to the Southwest, I didn't manage another visit to Cortez until about 5 years ago and even then, it was only about a half day visit. That's where the "half" of "...my second and half visit..." comes from. When I was moving from Buffalo to San Diego, Dad was living in Cortez and working on his initial book about the region's ancient culture. The quick visit and short timeline to get to San Diego didn't allow for a trip up the road to Mesa Verde even though it was tantalizingly close.

In late spring of this year, Dad was contacted by the folks at Kelly Place requesting the use of his Sand Canyon Trail Guide, which remained unfinished after a hard drive crash a couple years ago. Marc offered Dad a couple nights stay at Kelly Place to help him get the guide finished up. I got to be the lucky beneficiary of Dad moving overseas not long ago and jumped at the chance. I even booked an extra night in one of the campsites Kelly Place offers on their property. Since the drive from San Diego to Cortez takes about 13 hours, the extra night was really worth it. It gave me a chance to spend a day hiking and photographing along the Sand Canyon Trail and a full day to visit Mesa Verde again, 25 years after I first fell in love with the park.


I've never stayed in a Bed & Breakfast before (I was just never high class enough until recently), but if Kelly Place is an indication for how they all are, I can't wait to stay in more! Good breakfasts, nice room to stay in and friendly folks to chat with when I wasn't out with the camera. What more could you want? PLUS, on their property, there's a reconstructed pueblo, the granary high on the cliff wall as seen in the photos that accompany this post, ruins of another pueblo under excavation, a trail that runs through the property to over 25 documented historic culture site and allows easy access to Sand Canyon in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. In other words, if you're looking for a great and unique place to stay in the Four Corners area, I highly recommend Kelly Place!

A closer look at the ruins of the granary.

Granaries like this one are pretty common throughout the Southwest. They provided a safe place to store a pueblo's harvest for the winter ahead without worrying about rodents and other animals getting fat off the villagers' hard work. Take a look at the image above, just below the modern buildings in the background, there's a corner of a reconstructed pueblo sticking up through the grass. (It's difficult to see at the size image I have here in the blog, but as always you can click the image to see a larger version of the image where it'll be easier to see.) I've got plenty more images of this pueblo, known as Sue's Ruin, to share but I'll get to those in good time. It is likely that the granary shown on the cliff face in these images was built by the same folks who built Sue's Ruin and utilized it as their pantry.

I've got a ton more to come from this trip, so stay tuned!



Morning Reflections

Morning Reflections

And it's once again been another month since I last posted an update with a new photo. We're still suffering from less than ideal conditions for photography here in San Diego so I haven't gotten out much. In fact, not at all since I took the last image just over a month ago.

I'm also trying to wrap my head around a few things concerning my site. Chief among them is image sizing. My camera outputs images in a 2x3 ratio, a "standard" size for most cameras. But somehow, this isn't a standard ratio for frames and mattes. Scott Kelby (a Photoshop & general photography guru) wrote about it not long ago on his blog, here & here, and I've had some complaints from customers that they couldn't find frames to fit the prints I had available (sorry Mom!). Anyway, since most of my images are in the 2x3 ratio (8x12) and frames come in 2x2.5 ratios (8x10) it's a massive undertaking to overhaul all my images to fit what is best, and easiest, for customers. I'm still in the "thinking" process trying to figure out how best to deal with it, but in the meantime if you're looking for prints, please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions you have about sizing.

To get back on topic, the nice thing about not getting out to take photos regularly is that I've had some time to go back through my archive and find some really nice images that just got "left behind" when I was shooting more than I could process. It's easy to lose track, especially on a weekend where every sunrise and sunset has near perfect predicted conditions. That's what happened to this image, taken at Lake Hodges. That particular weekend, back in December of 2009, had near perfect sunrises and sunsets and it seems that I never got around to fully exploring my images from Saturday's sunrise. In fact, I only processed one image from that morning and there are a lot more from that morning that deserve some attention.

Stay tuned for some more "forgotten" images as I work my way through my archive!

Pastel Beach

After sunset at Torrey Pines State Beach

It's been just over a month since my last update and I promised back in May I that these types of lapses wouldn't happen, so I apologize! It has been a busy summer to say the least and we've had less than stellar weather for photography. San Diego's marine layer has persisted far deeper into the summer months than it normally does, more or less erasing any chance of sunrise and sunset (when the light for landscapes is at it's absolute best).

Towards the end of last week I started seeing far more clear sky in the evenings and checked Friday's forecast. The cloud cover was predicted to be about 8% at the coast and, with a high tide near sunset, I couldn't resist the call of the surf anymore. After work Friday I grabbed my camera and set out for Torrey Pines State Beach. You may remember this image, also taken at Torrey Pines State Beach, but at low tide.

When I arrived, I found total cloud cover. Absolute, 100%, not an inch of open sky overhead cloud cover. I had to fight the urge to turn right around and head home, but I convinced myself that getting some sand between my toes and going for a walk on the beach with my camera bag & tripod could count my exercise for the week. I hiked to the far end of the beach and was rewarded for my troubles with this scene on my walk back.

With the heavy cloud cover moving off to sea as if it was following the sun (it can be seen above the horizon on the left side of the image), the sky took on a pinkish glow which was reflected by the wet sand as the waves receded. I had to scramble to find an interesting foreground subject as most of the rocks in the area were underwater with the high tide. When I came across this rock, with the wet sand sweeping over top of it I had just a few moments to capture the scene before the glow in the sky faded.

Sometimes you just have to stick it out and get your toes in the sand...

Waves in the Trees

Eucalyptus Grove Abstract

Another abstract image from a few nights ago at Lake Miramar. The goal of the night was to come away with an image that could be used in the Stripes photo challenge I mentioned in my last post, but the very nature of this type of shooting is unpredictable.

I shot a few hundred frames that evening, doing my absolute best to only move the camera straight up and down while the shutter was open. However, as evidenced by this image, I wasn't always successful staying in a straight line. Many of those images were deleted right away when I saw them on my computer screen, but the gentle side-to-side motion in this one created a nice rhythmic feeling for me, almost like there were waves in the trees.